Road Tripping in Portugal: The North

Yesterday we woke up in Sintra, Portugal at the coolest hostel ever - a converted art museum that still has sketches and art hanging everywhere. It's like a little Victorian house, and they made us a homemade dinner and served it to us by candlelight.  Breakfast was on the back portico overlooking the rolling green hills.  Keep this in mind later in this story, because don't worry, karma caught up with us eventually.

We left Sintra and headed to Ericeara, a little surf town known for its strong waves and awesome seafood.  For lunch I had a pile of squid that were each about the size of my thumb and grilled whole.  They were tasty once I figured out how to eat them (a fair amount of trial and error was involved).  Here are some Ericeara photos:

After lunch we hopped back in the car and skipped up the road to Fátima.  In 1917 a few children were pretty sure they saw the Virgin Mary there, and she made some prophesies that apparently have come true.  So now there's a cathedral and convent and lots of souvenir shops selling rosary beads.  The churches are quite lovely.

In Fátima, it is not appreciated if you play your trombone, so leave it in the car please.

After that, we ended up in Coimbra for the night, which is a cool little university town.  It took all four of us to parallel park, and then we found what turned out to be the sketchiest hostel ever.  The proprietor was leaning in the door when we walked up, smoking a cigarette and appearing so completely unkempt that we thought he might be homeless.  The floors were sticky, the rooms smelled like sulfur and cigarette smoke, and the other patrons were wandering around in a strangely vacant fashion.  Bradley said it was like One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, and at dinner we laughed so hard over it all that we cried.  But it was cheap.

Dinner was lively, as a group of about 50 (yes really) Portuguese university students were celebrating a birthday at the same restaurant, and they were singing, chanting, toasting, singing again, and so on.  We joined in, of course, and we got a standing ovation from a few people when we sang a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" in English. It was fabulous.

This morning we got out of that nasty hostel place as soon as was humanly possible, and we stopped into  Aveiro, which is known as "the Venice of Portugal" for its canal system.  Sadly, we all agreed that it was not nearly going to rival actual Venice, although it was quite a picturesque little town.

And now, I'm blogging from Porto, where we are lucky to have driven up the steep, narrow streets without rolling backwards down the hills.  We're going to head out soon to take some wine tours and sample some port.  Mom and Dad (my favorite wine aficionados), get jealous.

I also feel compelled to say that I didn't mess with these pictures in photo editing to make the skies bluer - we've had nothing but cloudless days the whole time we've been here, and the electric blue skies are all natural, courtesy of Portugal and not Photoshop.  Isn't that ridiculous?